A long time ago when I had a PSP, my two favorite games on it were Burnout Legends and some version of Monster Hunter. Unfortunately I was never able to get very far with the latter no matter how much I loved the concept as I found the controls very difficult on a handheld platform, particularly as there was no lock-on feature and you needed to manually control the camera while controlling your character at the same time. Anyway that’s why through the years I kept an eye on the series and of course I eventually bought it when an English version finally made its way to the PC.

Commandos was one of the series of games that intrigued me but I never got around to playing any of them and now they seem too old to go back to. So along comes developer Mimimi Games who seems intent on single-handedly reviving this never very popular genre. This is described as a stealth-oriented real-time tactics game. It’s stealth as your characters can’t stand up to protracted combat and must rely on quietly taking out guards without alerting others. It’s real-time so there’s no way to pause to consider the situation and issue orders without time pressure. And I suppose it’s tactics because you’ll often need to have your characters work in concert to get past different obstacles and situations.

I bought this a while ago, motivated mainly because I now own a Hori Mini Fighting Stick and wanted to try different fighting games with it. Also because I have never played a single Soulcalibur game before and this newest entry in the franchise features Geralt of Rivia as a guest character. Beyond the fact that it’s one of the few fighting games involving characters who are armed with melee weapons plus the character Ivy in it often appears as a sex object, I knew nothing about this franchise beforehand.

So it was three years ago that I played Sunless Sea. I loved it so much that I had been looking forward to sitting down to play this sequel even though I knew that it is a very similar game. It is in fact nearly identical to the previous game in terms of gameplay but it does have a new setting, new stories and quests, better combat, and most of all, everything has been cleaned up and greatly improved with a better interface and much better graphics.

Tabletop wargaming is of course the ultimate in grognard hobbies, especially historical ones. I will never of course actually play a tabletop wargame, never mind go to the immense expense and effort to buy and paint miniatures. But from time to time, I do wonder what the rules for one might be like and how it might feel to play it. Enter Field of Glory 2 which aims to recreate this sort of experience on the PC, minus the miniature collecting and painting part of course. I don’t know if this is actually a popular ruleset for wargamers but I do know that they publish a hardback rulebook for this so it is a real tabletop wargame.

This is another game by a Chinese developer and after hearing about its premise I knew I just had to try it out no matter how poorly made or not it is. As you can tell by its title, it’s a kind of life sim in which you guide a child from infancy to the gaokao, China’s National College Entrance Examination. making choices on how to spend your time and which skills and studies to focus on. Along the way, you’ll have to grapple with meeting the expectations of your strict parents, avoid having a mental breakdown due to over-studying and maybe even make some friends or kindle a bit of romance as you grow up.

Like for so many other people, playing Planescape: Torment was for me a uniquely memorable experience, one of the few games I have ever played whose story I can still recall with startling clarity and emotion. Naturally when they announced this game as a spiritual successor, I was intrigued but also skeptical. I felt that I had to play this eventually out of loyalty to the original game and having done so, I’m left with mixed feelings. This does feel a lot like the game that inspired it, perhaps too much so because it seems to be trying too hard, yet at the end of the day it still feels inferior in almost every way.